


Objects In The Rear-View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are

by commoncomitatus



Category: Defiance (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Gen, Running Away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-04 01:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5315270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tag for "The Beauty Of Our Weapons".  Berlin struggles with her decision and her demons.  Conrad is as understanding as anyone can be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Objects In The Rear-View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are

—

_“You’re a coward.”_

It’s true. She is a coward. She always has been.

A a child, a lifetime before she ever heard of a town called Defiance, before she was old enough to put on a uniform or pick up a gun, fear was the only thing she had. Fear, and the way it took her by the throat, the way it whispered in her ear when there was no-one around to tell her not to listen, the way it caught her and held on tight and refused to let go. Fear, and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing she could arm herself with, nothing she could use to fight against it. _Fear_ , always so much bigger than her, always so much stronger than she could ever be. She was young and small, and the fear was everywhere and everything.

It wasn’t called cowardice when she was a kid. Being scared, running away, hiding from anything that moved. She was eight years old, helpless and completely alone, and the world was full of blood and death and pain, full of terrible, terrifying things; was it any wonder that it scared the life out of her? She had nothing, could do nothing, _was_ nothing. All she had was herself, and no-one had ever taught her how to be brave. It wasn’t cowardice; it was _survival_ , and it kept her alive.

It’s not like that any more. She’s older now, and the rules are different. She’s supposed to be the stronger one, the one who can control her feelings and her fears; she’s the one with the weapons and the training to use them, the one with height and power and muscle. She’s the one with a soldier’s experience and a lawkeeper’s arsenal, and in a world like this one that’s supposed to mean something. She keeps falling into these roles, keeps finding herself side-by-side with these people. Brave heroes with shining badges, and her clothes say that she’s supposed to be like that too. She’s supposed to be tough, the kind of person who would gladly put their life on the line for others, who jumps in front of bullets because they know it will keep some scared, lonely kid safe. She’s supposed to be doing all those things that no-one ever did for her.

Growing up scared is supposed to make you strong. Living with it every day, every minute, every breath, it’s supposed to teach you to be tough and brave and good. She should know how to handle her fear by now, should know how to control her feelings. It doesn’t work that way, though, and she’s worse now than she ever was back then. She never learned how to face the fear, how to stare it down and beat it into submission; all she ever learned was how to anticipate the stuff that scared her. She spent her childhood waiting for the monsters to jump out of the shadows or step around the corner, and learning again and again and again what happened when they did.

Being brave was being stupid. It was ending up dead, or worse than dead. Staying alive, staying _safe_ … that was running away. It was hiding, staying out of sight, making herself as small as possible. Survival didn’t mean mastering her fear; it just meant learning how to breathe when it had its fist around her throat.

It kept her alive, even on the days she wished she wasn’t. It kept her in one piece for long enough to realise that the world didn’t begin and end with freezing and starving and trembling. It kept her going until she was old enough to join the Earth Republic. She’d never seen anything like it before, the shiny uniforms and the shiny guns and the shiny people who weren’t afraid of anything; they wore bravery like she wore fear, and she was just naïve enough to believe that she could become brave just like them.

She couldn’t, though, and it was stupid to think that a shirt could change her. She’d spent too long in the shadows, and the fear had buried itself too deep inside of her to ever get it out. It had kept her alive, and it was harder than she ever could have imagined to try and switch it off when the moment finally came where she didn’t need it. With a gun in her hands, clothes on her back and a roof over her head, with meat and muscle on her bones and heat in her head, she thought it would be easy.

It wasn’t.

It’s no coincidence that she ended up making films, that she ended up shooting other people’s shots instead of taking her own. It’s definitely no coincidence that she ended up sitting pretty in Defiance, safe and sound at Niles Pottinger’s right hand. It was safe, hiding behind a camera, and all the more so in a uniform that told easy-to-swallow lies, a shade of blue that let the world believe she was more than she ever really was.

Even now, she tries not to think of what came before the cameras, before the lenses and the tripods and the money shots. She tries not to remember the combat training and the tours of duty, the blood and the bodies and the stench of burning flesh; even now, she tries not to remember how deep the terror ran, and the shame that went with it. Her brothers and sisters wore it well; a smile, and a grimace, and they put it all behind them, while she screamed in the shower and prayed that the water would drown it out. Easier to pretend none of that ever happened. Easier to pretend it was all just another one of her films.

 _“You’re a coward,”_ Amanda said, and she knows that it’s true. She knows the difference between a scared, lonely kid and a full-grown soldier. She knows that there’s only one word for a lawkeeper who turned her back on a town full of people who needed her.

She knows that she’s a coward. She _knows_. But, oh, it’s so hard to remember that she’s supposed to be a full-grown soldier when she still feels like a scared, lonely kid. It’s so hard to remember where she’s been and what she’s done when she can’t stop thinking of the lessons she was forced to learn. It’s hard to remember that she still has clothes and food, that she still has a roof over her head, hard to remember that she is strong and lean, armed and dangerous, that she can take care of herself, that she’s supposed to take care of others too. It is so damn hard to remember what she should be when all she can think of is what she was.

She wants to do the right thing. More than anything in the whole damn world she wants to go back there and do her job. She wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Defiance, the people who took her in when the E-Rep left, the people who accepted her even when they had a thousand reasons to hate her. She wants to do her part for the town that trusted her to be the lawkeeper they deserve; she wants to be that person, but she’s not. She never was, and now they all know it.

 _“You’re a coward,”_ Amanda said, and she wanted to scream _‘yes! yes, isn’t that what I just told you?’_ , and she wanted to ask _‘why? why is that such a terrible thing?’_ , and she wanted to say so many things… but she was so scared, so lonely, and so terribly ashamed.

Soldiers don’t get to hide. Lawkeepers don’t get to run away. Cities like Berlin don’t get to fall.

It wasn’t called cowardice when she was a kid, but a uniform twists the story and a badge turns it into something else entirely. Fear is cowardice in this new version, and she doesn’t have that luxury any more. She’s not allowed to stand up and say _‘I can’t do this’_ , not when the shirts and the badge and the guns say that she can. Their colours carry more weight than she does.

Irisa gets to be as scared as she likes. She gets to be weak, gets to be small and helpless; she gets to hide and run away and do whatever she needs. She gets to do all of that because she’s been through a ‘trauma’, because they say some spaceship took over her brain and made her do terrible things, because she never did anything that wasn’t against her will. That’s what they say, anyway, but they all know it’s more than that.

The truth is, Irisa gets to be scared because she looks the part. She looks young, she looks innocent, she looks helpless; she looks like the kind of wounded, broken young adult who had a traumatic childhood. Irisa didn’t have to put on a uniform or pick up a gun; she found a father instead. Nolan taught her everything she needed, patched her up and made her better but never let anyone forget what she’d been through. Irisa is allowed to be scared; she can run away and hide, and no-one will ever call her a coward.

But Berlin is not like Irisa, and she doesn’t get to do those things any more. It doesn’t matter that she’s been through her own kind of trauma, that her childhood was its own special kind of hell; in her, it’s supposed to be dead and buried by now. She traded in her traumas for a badge and a gun, sold her pain for a hot meal and a fresh set of clothes, and she will never be allowed to call on them again.

Amanda’s words hurt more than she will ever admit, because she’s the one who was supposed to understand. She talks about her own history like it’s the textbook for everyone else’s, like she has the monopoly on childhood angst. She doesn’t, though; in her own heartbroken way, she was as lucky as Irisa.

Amanda had her sister, her Kenya; she had someone to protect, someone to live for, and that changes everything. It gave her a reason to be brave, and someone to talk to, a body and a voice, a friend to help chase the fear away when it got too close. Amanda had everything she ever needed to make herself strong, but Berlin had no-one at all. No-one to protect or take care of, no-one to talk to. _No-one_. The only family she had was dead, and her only companion was the memory of watching them bleed and scream and die.

She never made herself strong, always too much a victim of her own experience. Everything she was, everything that made her has been too present and too real for too damn long.

Maybe that’s her fault, maybe she’s just making excuses. Maybe she’s naturally vulnerable to things that other people can shrug off; maybe she never had what it takes to deal with them. Maybe it was inevitable, the way she was born or the way she’s wired or whatever other scientific bullshtak some genius somewhere might spout. Or, hell, maybe she really is just a coward, weak and worthless and utterly deserving of their hate.

 _“Second thoughts?”_ Conrad asked before they left Defiance. He always did know her too well, always did see the stuff she thought she’d hidden away. She should have seen it coming.

Honestly, he probably knew that she’d say _‘no’_ even before she realised it herself, knew it would happen as surely as he knew that it would be a lie. Cowardice runs just as deep in both directions, and she could no more turn away from the path she’d found herself walking than she could have kept herself from heading down it in the first place. She’s always been like this, blind panic masquerading as follow-through and the childish delusion that she’d planned it all along.

So here she is, riding shotgun in Conrad’s oversized gun truck, staring at the horizon and pretending it’s the sun in her eyes that’s making her blink.

Conrad notices that too, of course, but he knows better than to ask about it. He might not understand, no more than Amanda or Nolan or any of the others she left behind in Defiance, but he does know her, and he knows that asking questions will only earn him a black eye. ( _Another_ black eye, technically). So he keeps his thoughts to himself, keeps his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel, and pretends to believe her when she clenches her jaw and curses the sun.

They’re about halfway across the Badlands when the guilt hits. It comes hard and fast, a blow to the chest that leaves her damn near breathless, and it takes everything she has not to start sobbing right then and there.

It flashes in front of her, a vision as clear as day: Nolan, Amanda, her friends and her would-be family, even stupid Irisa, all of them screaming and bleeding and dying. Over and over again, she sees it, an endless reel of old-Earth film projected onto her mind’s eye, and it’s so much like the memories that haunt her, her mother and her brother and their final terrible moments. It repeats again now, imagined but no less visceral. Amanda, gurgling and choking just like her mother; Nolan, defiant and dead just like her brother. She wants to cry, wants to be sick, wants to jump out of the truck and find freedom when the tyres crush her.

She doesn’t do that, of course. She just hunches forward, bracing her hands against the dashboard, and fights with everything she has to breathe past the claws around her throat.

Conrad doesn’t look at her. It’s deliberate, without a shadow of doubt, and she doesn’t know whether to be grateful or upset. “You okay?” he asks, voice cool and calm.

“Yeah.” They both know it’s bullshit, of course, but she has to try; for her sake, so much more than his, she has to cling to the lie. “Just… do you mind if we stop for a bit? I need some air.”

He cuts her a quick, cautious glance. It’s fleeting, and very careful like he knows he’s risking a punch in the face by daring to look at her when she’s feeling this vulnerable.

“Right,” he says with a tight little laugh. “You never did have the stomach for long road trips.”

It’s so matter-of-fact, the way he says it, so blasé and harmless; it’s just a stupid, senseless figure of speech, she knows, but still it slams into her like something horrible, more brutal than any blow. _‘Stomach’_ , he says, but she hears _‘guts’_ , and it makes her think _‘courage’_.

“Shut up.” It comes out too sharp, the kind of empty threat that has always bounced right off him. “Just pull over, will you?”

He studies her for a moment, long enough that she nudges him to pay attention to the road. He does, rolling his eyes and ignoring the way her elbows are too sharp as well. It’s another long beat before he does what he’s told, and he makes a show of being grudging about it.

He’s always been a little too good at that sort of thing, at putting on exactly the right kind of show for exactly the right kind of moment, like he’s some kind of expert at judging her body language and her face. He’s too good, and she’s too damn transparent; she hates the way he always sees seen the parts of her she hates, the parts that make her go red at the back of the neck and white at the jaw, the parts that make her angry and ashamed.

He tries to reach for her once the engine’s cut, but she doesn’t give him a chance. She leaps down from the truck as soon as it’s stationary, hits the ground so hard that pain vibrates through her ankles, then storms away without a word.

They’ve landed in a nice-looking spot. It’s the middle of nowhere, the ass end of the Badlands, and the road is a dangerous zig-zag along the edge of what looks like a cliff. It’s a sharp drop from a dizzying height, and the morbid filmmaker in her wonders how many bodies lie broken at the bottom, never to be found. If they were still driving, speeding round the corners like Conrad loves to do, it would be dangerous, but now that they’re stopped and safe it makes for a great view.

She walks for a while, follows the dry grass between the road and the ravine, then sits down when her strength gives out. She inches forward, closer and closer to the drop, until her legs are dangling over the edge. It makes her pulse race, makes it easier to hold on to the fear and chase away the guilt, and while she struggles to catch her breath she studies the horizon with a filmmaker’s eye. Terraformed rock sprawled out in front of her, jagged rocks that pierce the sky, and the dirt road twisting and turning behind; the clash of old and new makes her uneasy, but it would make a gorgeous opening shot, the kind of world-stopping panorama that would dazzle even the E-Rep big-shots in New York…

The thought makes her heart stop, pain lancing her gut. There it is, the too-late realisation that New York is gone, laid to waste by a spaceship-controlled Irathient, by _Irisa_ , the poor wounded broken-wing who is allowed to run away. The Earth Republic is gone too, she remembers, and so are all the idiots who ever watched her stupid films. It makes her dizzy, twists the fear back into guilt; they clash inside of her, the two terrible feelings, and it makes the cliff-drop seem to swerve and stretch to the centre of the Earth.

That would make a good film too, she thinks. A horror movie.

She closes her eyes until the dizziness passes, fights to keep the guilt and the panic in check, the fear clawing at her throat and the pain in her chest that makes her wish she had the strength to turn around and go back. She can’t stop thinking about Defiance, can’t stop picturing the town and the people that she left behind. They depended on her, trusted her as a soldier with the E-Rep then trusted her again as a lawkeeper when she traded in the uniform for a badge; they put their lives in her hands in a dozen different ways, and never knew until it was too late that she didn’t deserve it.

They know it now. She made sure of that. She turned around and ran away, left them to their fate without a second thought. Rahm Tak and the Votanis Collective, all the threats she swore to oppose when she joined up with the E-Rep, all the challenges she promised to face when she became their lawkeeper. All of it, all the nightmares and the horrors and the terrible things she remembers from her own childhood, all the things she can’t name, won’t name, the things she can’t stop thinking about, can’t stop picturing. All of it. She turned around, ran away, and left them to face it all alone.

She’s shaking like a leaf by the time Conrad finds her. He doesn’t mention it, of course; he doesn’t say anything at all. He just sits down next to her with a sigh and a sad sort of smile, and it doesn’t surprise him at all when he reaches out to touch her and she flinches away.

“Shouldn’t you be with the truck?” she asks. Her voice rasps, hitching like a child’s. “There could be—”

“—raiders out here.” It’s effortless, the way he finishes for her, and she doesn’t know whether to be touched by how well he knows her or annoyed by how presumptuous it makes him sound. Funny how she never could seem to figure that out. “You think there’s raiders everywhere.”

“There _are_ raiders everywhere.” 

The fear tightens as she says it, memories as sharp as Irisa’s stupid Irathient blades. It’s stupid, being afraid of raiders when they have a truck full of weapons, but she’s always been that way. Worse than alien spaceships, worse than the kind of thing that flattens entire cities, it’s the memory of raiders in masks that chill her to the bone. Everywhere she looks, even when she knows she’s safe, there they are. Lurking in the shadows, hiding behind dark corners, waiting and waiting and waiting, and—

“Jess.” She doesn’t flinch when he touches her this time, but it takes everything she has not to scream.

“Shut up,” she forces out, the words shaky and wet. “It’s a sensible thing to worry about. Besides, you can’t afford to piss off your family any more than you already have. How do you think your mother would react if you told her you gave away half a truck full of weapons to impress the girl she tried to buy off, then lost the other half to raiders while you were trying to get lucky?”

He laughs, flashes that self-deprecating grin of his, the one that would always turn her to putty. “I think she’d admire my balls,” he says. “Then probably cut ’em off.”

“Mhm.” She can’t help herself; she grins too. “Probably.”

Naturally, he takes the moment’s softness as a victory, leaning in to nudge her shoulder with his own. It’s more effective than his hands, the aborted touch from a moment ago and the one that made her want to scream, and she doesn’t protest at all; she’s still shaking, still weaker than she’d ever let him see by choice, but at least it’s on her terms now. A small victory, but hers as much as his.

“Come on, Jess.” It’s an invitation, voice low and shimmering with the kind of sweetness he usually saves for their intimate moments. He always was so eager to turn on the charm when all she ever wanted was to get things done. “Why come out here if you’re not going to talk to me?”

 _Because it’s easy,_ she thinks. _Because you’re safe and Defiance isn’t. Because I’m a worthless chupping coward._

“Never could resist a pretty face,” she says out loud, and lets herself relax ever so slightly with his laughter.

“Especially not one with a bloody nose.” He huffs another laugh, but this one isn’t so wry. “Should’ve known.”

He’s still grinning, but it’s not like before. There’s no self-deprecation there now; just like the laugh, it’s softer, skirting dangerous close to sympathy. She hates the way he’s looking at her, like he knows he’s dealing with something delicate, something fragile and prone to breaking, like he sees the eight-year-old inside of her and knows how scared she is. It’s new and upsetting; she never let him see her weaknesses before, and it hits her harder than she expected, knowing that he can see it all without the least effort, that she’s become so broken and exposed even when she doesn’t want to be.

“Conrad…”

He cuts her off with a wave. “Don’t worry. You don’t want to tell me what’s bothering you, that’s just fine. I’m not going to push. You know I’m not that guy.” His eyes harden, just a little. “But I _am_ the guy who has to sit in a truck with you for another eight hours. Even on a good day, that’s not fun for anyone.”

“Shut up.” She elbows him in the ribs; she means it playfully, but it ends up skirting dangerously close to violence. “I’m a delight.”

“Sure you are.” He nudges her back, soft in all the places where she’s too hard. “Look. Whatever it is, I’m not judging. Hell, we both know I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. You know all my dirty little secrets. I tried it on with you, you’d put me out of business for good.” It’s meant in jest, but neither of them laugh. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

“Right. ‘Curious’.” She rolls her eyes, lets him see that she’s not buying it, wonders briefly if he expected her to. “That’s really what you’re going with?”

He shrugs, smiles again, but the mirth doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Have I ever lied about my intentions before?”

“I wouldn’t know.” It comes harder than she expects, admitting it aloud. “Communication was never our strong point, was it?”

That’s true enough, and it tastes more bitter now than it did back then. If they’d been a little better at that, maybe things wouldn’t have gone to hell the way they did. Conrad’s mother was always a mean-spirited, meddling shrew, but it’s hard to blame her completely when they both took her scheming at face value. It’s not exactly difficult for a bitter old woman to manipulate two people when they barely say more than two words to each other in the first place; smart though she was, it wasn’t exactly the work of a genius. It didn’t help much, either that they were often so far apart. Conrad with his guns and the ‘family business’, Berlin with the E-Rep and her perpetual reassignment, and as easy as it would be to blame his mother for the way it ended between them, they both know they’re at much at fault as she ever was.

It wasn’t a bad match, at least for a while. What they had was good for as long as they had it, and their strengths balanced out their weaknesses in the all best ways. It was pleasant, comfortable, and they both needed a little bit of comfort in their lives. For a time, it was good enough, and what more could either of them have asked for?

Berlin wasn’t exactly young, but she had a kind of naïveté that was hard to shake off. A product of her childhood, probably, of never learning what it meant to be well-adjusted. She was as far from innocent as anyone could possibly be, but the parts of her that didn’t know what maturity was matched perfectly with the parts of Conrad that stubbornly refused to grow up. She didn’t know how to, and he just didn’t want to. It was a match made as much in heaven as in hell.

Conrad was never naïve, not like she was, but he played the part like a damned pro. He was charismatic and immature in all the most wonderful ways; his boyish charm covered up his own insecurities, his place the black sheep of the prestigious Von Bachs. They came together a little too well, the parts of her that didn’t know how to settle down and the parts of him that weren’t ready to, the hidden places where he was every bit as screwed up as she was. He wasn’t perfect, but of course he never pretended to be. _“Flaws are more fun,”_ he used to say, and flashed that grin until she laughed. For someone like Berlin, who had never had the freedom to feel that way, who’d never had a safe place to laugh like that, to see her flaws reflected in someone who didn’t automatically see them as weaknesses, that was intoxicating.

It was probably for the best that things turned out the way they did in the end, though that didn’t make it sting any less; either way, there was a bittersweet kind of irony in the fact that she was single and free and angry by the time she was sent to Defiance.

Her resentments made it easier to swallow the grumblings and mutterings of a town that hated her people and everything they stood for, made it easier to do her job without looking back. It made it easy, too, to give in to Tommy Lasalle, to his smile and his laugh and his finely-sculpted ass. Tommy was the first person in that shtakhole town who gave her the time of day, the first person who looked past the uniform and the gun and the propaganda, who understood what she was trying to do. Falling into bed with him, and falling for him, was so damn easy.

Maybe she should thank Conrad for that. Hell, maybe she should thank his mother. More likely, she should probably curse the both of them for the heartbreak it put her through. Probably, yeah, but it’s been too long, and by now she’s at least mostly healed. Healed enough that she can pass Irisa on the street these days, that she can look her in the eye, even work beside her, and not want to tear her limb from limb. Enough that, if she had her time again, if she found her gasping and spasming and bleeding in the snow like she did a few weeks ago, maybe this time she wouldn’t walk away. Healed enough, at the very least, that she can look at Conrad now and not wonder _‘what if?’_

He’s staring at her again, that sort-of soft look on his face, and she knows what’s coming even before he says it. “ _Jess_ ,” again, all sweet and low, like the name is a kind of secret. In a twisted sort of way, maybe it is. He’s the only one who ever got away with calling her that, the only one who said it in a way she could stomach. The only one who said it like a name, not a criticism. The only one who made her smile when he said it…

The only one, yeah. Until Amanda.

The name slams into her, and with it a fresh vision of her face. _Amanda_ , smiling in one moment and betrayed in the next, and tears flood Berlin’s vision before she can even try to stop them.

Conrad sees that too, of course. It’s agony, the way he leans in, the way his thumbs finds the corner of her eyes, the way his lips find the lashes, chasing away the tears before they have a chance to fall into the ravine. It’s another thing he’s always been too good at, smothering the anguish when all she wants is to lie down and let it shatter her. He knows her so well, too well, but he never understood why it sometimes hurt worse when he drove the pain away.

It does that now, too. Amanda’s face vanishes, the tears along with it, and Berlin hates him for it.

“Don’t do that,” she says, and pulls away.

He doesn’t follow when she inches back, retreating into herself like a snail hiding in its shell. He’s seen this before, and this time he doesn’t try to make things better. She wraps her arms around her knees and pulls them in, and still he doesn’t say anything. She always did feel more comfortable hugging herself than anyone else; he knows that all too well.

It’s a long, long moment before he says her name again. “ _Jess_ ,” like a promise, like he knows he screwed up but isn’t prepared to walk away just yet. It’s funny, albeit in a tragic sort of way; if they’d asked her two years ago, she never would have guessed that he would be the one to grow up.

She hasn’t, though, and it shows in her voice. “What?” she snaps, voice like razor-wire. “Jesus, Conrad, you know I’m bad at this shtak. You know that.”

“I know. Still, can’t blame a guy for trying, can you?” He sighs again, sobering quickly. “Look, I know it’s not easy…”

“Oh, you know that?”

“Yeah, I do know that.” It’s uncharacteristic, the sharpness in his voice, and it makes her sit up and listen. “You think I didn’t see the look on your face before we left Defiance? You think it wasn’t obvious, how you felt?” He shakes his head, as close to bitter as she’s ever seen him. “You never were any good at hiding, Jess, not from me or anyone else, and it’s about forty-two flavours of hilarious that you think you are.”

“Shut—”

“—up. Yeah, I don’t think so.” He bares his teeth, as far from a smile as anything she’s ever seen on him. “You think you can hide your feelings by hiding your eyes. You think you can just turn your face away and people won’t notice that you’re scared or lonely or just plain broken. But yeah, we do. And I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with this ‘stoic self-righteous’ thing you’re doing, but I can tell you right now, you’re sure as hell not fooling me.”

She thinks about punching him again but she doesn’t. Maybe she has grown up a little after all. “You want a medal for that?”

“Hell, no.” There’s a bite in the way he says it, though, not quite bitterness but something close. “I’m not a soldier, remember? Your fancy E-Rep medals don’t mean anything to simple-minded businessmen like me.” He heaves another sigh, deep and heavy, like he’s bracing himself, getting his feet steady under him before he steps out onto dangerous ground. “Neither does stuff like ‘honour’ and ‘integrity’ and… what was it?… ‘doing the right thing’.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” she grumbles. “I know.”

“Yeah. One of the reasons you fell in love with me, right?”

She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t deny it. “What’s your point, Conrad?”

“My point is, your precious Defiance is a lost cause. Dead in the water. I’ve seen the guys they’re going up against. Hell, I sold them their arsenal. Trust me when I tell you that town’s as good as dead. It’s not your fault you figured it out in time to jump ship, and it’s not your fault the rest of them are too bull-headed not to do the same.” She opens her mouth to argue, but he doesn’t give her the chance. “Yeah, yeah. I know, _‘the captain’s supposed to go down with the ship’_ , or whatever that metaphor is. But, hey, guess what? Your ship’s already sunk, and even if it hadn’t, you’re not a captain any more.”

She flinches. It’s no secret, but he should know better than to throw that particular punch. He has to know how deep it cuts, how much it hurts. It’s everything she ever worked for, everything she ever achieved in her life, and it’s as dead as Defiance; he has to know that it stings, has to know. But of course, he’s never been one for softening blows, not when the hard ones are so much more effective. Not when she’s hardly known for reciprocating soft touches.

“I know that,” she grits out, lets him see his hard blow found its mark. “You don’t need to remind me.”

“Yeah, I guess not.” He takes a breath, leans back on his hands. “Sorry.”

She quirks a brow. Neither one of them have ever been much for apologies; this is new. “You are?”

“Sure, why not? I’m man enough to know when I cross the line.” He shrugs, but he can’t quite meet her eye when he says it. He looks almost nervous, like he’s trying to navigate a minefield. “Look. All I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t feel bad for looking after yourself first. Like it or not, that town of yours is screwed. One more pair of hands isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Yeah?” Berlin huffs a humourless laugh, forces back visions of Amanda’s face, of her mother’s, of so many raiders. “Tell that to the history books.”

Conrad studies her for a long moment then he laughs too, long and loud. “You’re a historian now?”

“Shut up.”

He’s still chuckling, but at least does what he’s told. She’ll take that as a win.

For a few long minutes, neither one of them says anything at all. Conrad doesn’t move, just sits there quietly, keeping a safe distance from her. Close enough to touch if she needs him, far enough away that she can pretend he’s not there if that’s what she wants; oh, yeah, he’s good at this.

He entertains himself by staring off into the distance, tracing the long jagged lines of terraformed rock along the horizon, and Berlin wonders what he’s thinking about, if he’s seeing the same propaganda panorama that she did when she came out here, if he sees the world through the same heavily-filtered lenses. She won’t ask him, of course, but she wonders.

The silence is heavy, but she’s thankful for it just the same. It makes it easier, having him there without having to listen to him running his mouth. She’s never been very good at being alone; loneliness makes makes her pulse come quicker, makes the fear tighten its grip around her throat, makes her feel like a kid again. She doesn’t have much in the way of self-awareness, but she has enough to know that solitude would make a bad mixer for the way she’s feeling right now. The fear and the panic cut deep enough already without loneliness to sharpen their fangs.

This is what it’s like, being a coward. What it’s really like, not what people like Amanda and Nolan think it’s like. They sneer when they say it, like it’s something easy, but it’s not, and the looks on their faces make it painfully clear that they will never understand how hard it truly is.

It’s not just about running away. It’s not just hiding under tables when things get too real, ducking in and out of the shadows when they stretch out to smother and suffocate and slaughter. It’s not just letting down the people who depend on her and never giving it a second thought. It’s living with all those things, feeling them every minute of every damn day; it’s knives at her back and bullets in her brain, demons that whisper in her ears and never ever stop. It’s claws around her throat, pain tearing through her chest; it’s panic and paranoia and paralysis, and it hurts all the time. It’s not being able to think or move or breathe; it’s being so damn scared she wishes her heart would stop so she doesn’t have to feel it any more. It’s closing her eyes and seeing ghosts, then opening them and finding monsters.

Amanda will never know how much it took out of her to say what she did, to admit the words out loud, to let them out and let someone else in. Just two little words — _“I’m scared”_ — and Amanda will never ever know that they damn near killed her.

She supposes she should have known. Should have realised that Amanda wasn’t like her, should have seen it in her eyes, in the way she faced danger, in the way she never seemed to hide from anything, least of all her own past. They are nothing alike, not in any of the ways that matter. It was so easy to imagine that they were, though, so easy to get sucked in by the way Amanda would look at her and smile, the way she pinned all of her hopes on an idiot with a gun, the way she pinned that badge on her chest like it was the most natural thing in the world.

 _“A fresh start,”_ she said, and Berlin had never seen so much pride in one person’s eyes. Not when they were looking at her, anyway. _“A home, too, if you want it.”_

She did want it. If she’s honest with herself, really brutally honest, she still wants it. Not the home Conrad promises now, but the one Amanda promised back then. What Amanda gave her, what the town of Defiance gave her, Berlin won’t ever be able to pay back. She knows that, oh yes, but there’s a part of her, tiny and fragile, that wishes it could try.

It’s so damn hard, being a coward. It’s hard, being scared and broken and knowing that it’s not okay, that it’s not acceptable. It’s not the right kind of damage, the stuff that strangles her. She’s not like Irisa, not broken in the places people can see, pretty and waif-like, with her sad mouth and her haunted eyes. Irisa looks younger than she is; there’s an innocence in the way she moves and a maturity in the way she talks. It throws people off-guard, makes them look at her with pity in their eyes and pain in their hearts. Irisa keeps her ghosts in her eyes all the time, and Berlin envies her for that so much that it hurts. Jealousy, the kind that only broken people understand, the kind that says _‘I wish I was as wounded as you’_ or _‘I wish my pain was as valid as yours’_.

It’s not, though. She wears it differently, patches it up with uniforms and badges, changes it into something else. She doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve like Irisa does, and she only lets the ghosts out of her head when she’s alone. She learned a long time ago the cost of letting people see those places, of letting too much out and letting them in. Their sad smiles and sympathetic eyes had a habit of turning into sharp teeth and sharp knives when the lights went out, and she didn’t have a father like Nolan to teach her what to do and who to trust. She had to learn that all by herself, and she did. Again and again and again, she learned.

She had no choice. She had to become harder than the world around her, had to put on the uniform, had to pick up the gun; she had nothing else to protect her. It’s not fair that those things define her now, not fair that she’s not allowed to put down the gun and show them how badly her hands are shaking; it’s not fair that she’s not allowed to take off the uniform and show them what’s underneath.

Inside, she’s not so different from Irisa, but no-one ever wants to see that. They’ve already decided that she’s not.

 _“I’m scared,”_ she said to Amanda. She meant _‘it’s crippling me, it’s killing me, I can’t breathe’_ but of course Amanda didn’t hear that part. She saw the badge, saw the gun, saw a woman who wasn’t fit to carry either. She saw a coward, and refused to look for anything else.

The memory stings, salt searing behind her eyes. She presses her forehead to her knees, and tries to keep breathing.

“Hey.”

Conrad touches the back of her neck. His fingers are strong, palm impossibly warm, and the contact drags a wet laugh out of her. He never wears gloves, never feels the cold at all; meanwhile, she’s wrapped up in more layers than either one of them can count. One more thing they could never quite agree on.

“Hey,” she says.

He rubs her neck, fingers circling the nape in a soothing, sickening rhythm. “You good?”

She shakes her head, and swallows roughly. It hurts, being honest, but she does it. “No.”

“Need me to leave you alone?”

It’s a simple question, or at least he has a talent for making it sound like one, but her heart damn near bursts to hear it. He’s the only person she’s ever met who understands that, yeah, sometimes that is what she needs; a centimetre in one direction or the other and the loneliness will kill her, but line it up just right and it’s exactly what she needs. She’ll never know how he does it, how he can read those lines so clearly, turn all of the twisted, impossible things inside her into something she can swallow and stomach, something that almost makes sense. She’ll probably never know how he does it, but right now it’s enough that he does.

“You mind?” she asks, and squeezes her knees.

“Do you even need to ask?”

He sounds almost offended, though they both know he’s not capable of such a thing; it’s all for show, but it makes her feel guilty just the same.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, and imagines the word echoing off the cliff face, bouncing down and down until it disappears.

“No, you’re not.” It’s not an accusation, just a statement of fact. He leans in closer, exhales against the side of her head; his breath is as warm as his hand. “I’ll go wait by the truck.”

She expects him to kiss her, but he doesn’t. He just stands up, dirt and gravel crunching under his boots, and takes a long step back. She shivers as the cold air floods in to replace his warmth, but she doesn’t lift her head. She should, she knows, should at least have the decency to look him in the eye when he goes, but she doesn’t want him to see the way hers are wet with tears. Honestly, he probably already knows that they are, but seeing it is something else entirely; it would make them too real, make this too intimate. They were together long enough that he recognises the difference, and he respects it.

“Thanks,” she mumbles, the word stifled by her legs.

“Ah, don’t mention it.” She can hear the smile in his voice, and the strain simmering underneath; she wonders if she was this much work the last time they were together. “Love you.”

“I know.” It’s all she can say, and they both know why.

He leaves without another word, and she has never been more grateful for anything in her life. That’s one thing Tommy never quite figured out, one thing he never understood about her. He was always so gentle, always so kind, and he never knew when to shut that off, when to stop being so much like himself. It makes her ache now to think of all the times she shouted at him for being too tender, chided him for coddling her, yelled at him for not respecting her personal boundaries and her personal space. She wonders if he knew how much of herself she was trying to keep hidden, the pain and the fear and the horrors that she didn’t want him to see. She wonders what he’d think if he knew it was more for her sake than for his.

She never hid from Conrad; she never needed to. They never talked about the rough stuff, but he always seemed to understand, always knew exactly the right moment to slam on the brakes. He always said that she was so easy to read, that even an idiot would be able to figure out what she’s feeling, but Tommy proved him wrong, and Amanda proved him wronger. It makes it a little easier, being here with him instead of back there with her, makes it easier to pretend that if she sticks around for long enough, if she loses a little of the fear and the guilt and all the rest of it, maybe she’ll realise that she really does love him.

Probably not. Deep down, she knows that. But hey, at least she’s safe. And isn’t that what she wanted?

She remembers the look Amanda’s face, the uncharacteristic cruelty when she blurted it out.

 _“He loves me,”_ she said, and Amanda laughed at her. Short and sharp, more of a huff than a laugh, but it struck like a blow.

 _“Oh, please,”_ she scoffed, like she could not believe that someone like Berlin could ever be loved. Berlin flinched, a full-body shudder that Amanda must have noticed, because she looked for a moment like she wanted to take it back. _“And do you love him?”_ she asked then, as if she could soften a blow that had already landed, as if she could un-twist the blade by turning it in another direction.

She was kind enough not to call her bluff, though, and didn’t point out that she was better equipped than anyone to understand what _“I don’t know”_ really means.

It’s hard to admit, but it doesn’t scare her like so many other truths do. Honestly, once upon a time, she really did love him. When they were together, always on opposite sides of the country, being in love was easy. It was easy to care about someone when she never actually saw him, easy to convince herself that what they shared was real intimacy when all they ever did when they came together was… well, come together. It was easy to imagine that passion was love, that it was enough to have someone, to feel something, to not be completely alone. It was so, so easy to believe, and for a blessed, beautiful time, believing made it real.

He rarely saw her bad days, and she seldom saw his. They missed each other all the time, and they never caught the moments that cut, never had a chance to see or salt the wounds that had made them who they were. They barely knew each other at all, so of course they assumed they knew each other perfectly. It worked, because the things they got were the clean things, the simple things.

He never saw her break down after a bad mission, never saw the lesions on her skin when she scrubbed herself raw and still didn’t feel clean enough. She never saw the hurt in his eyes when he fought with his family, never swept up the glasses he shattered against the wall when it was over. His side of the bed was always empty when she had nightmares, and hers was always cold when insomnia made him toss and turn for weeks on end. They never shared that stuff, never even mentioned it. Of course it was so damn easy; they swept the monsters under the carpet and pretended not to notice when it started to bulge.

She wants to believe that will change now. She wants to believe that this time will be different, but she knows it won’t. If it was, she wouldn’t have waited until he was gone before she let herself cry.

That’s something she’s always done, though. Not just with Conrad or Tommy or whoever else shared her bed over the years; no-one’s ever been allowed to see her cry like this. Honestly, that might be another part of the problem, another one of the countless reasons why nobody believes she could possibly be broken in the same way that Irisa is. It pushes people away, the fact that she doesn’t let them in, the way she never lets her feelings touch her face.

She’s not sure why she still does it, even with people she knows are safe. Pride, maybe, or else a different kind of fear, a fresh new breed of cowardice. She’s afraid that they will look at her differently, afraid that they will treat her like something weak and fragile… and, yeah, maybe she’s also afraid that it will drive home those truths in her own head as well, remind her that this is who she is, that she is weak and fragile, that some part of her will always be eight years old, that she will never quite be able to shake off the scared, lonely kid she hates so much. She can’t let anyone else see that, because she can’t let herself remember how it felt. She has to look strong, has to make them all believe that she is. If she doesn’t, she’ll remember that she’s not.

She remembers it now. How it felt. How it still feels.

 _You’re a coward._ It echoes in her head, over and over and over, and she wants it to be wrong, wants it to be like it was when she was a kid, when she really was as young and small as she feels. Eight years old, scared and lonely, and being scared was braver than bravery, and cowardice was called courage. She wants to go back, wants to live those moments again, if only to remember what it was like when it was all right, when she was allowed to feel like this.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers out loud, though she knows there’s no-one around to hear it. “I’m sorry. I’m…”

But there’s just too much. She’s sorry, so damn sorry, for so many things. She doesn’t even know where to begin.

She wishes she could be like Amanda. Strong, steady, sober even when she’s drunk. Amanda can put her troubled past behind her without the least effort, seemingly without any thought at all. It still stings, thinking of the way she shrugged off the words. _“Are we trading childhood sob-stories?”_ she asked, and Berlin didn’t understand how she could say it like that, like it really doesn’t tear her apart to talk about it, like it doesn’t pull her guts out through her mouth to even try and say the words, to go back there and remember. Berlin knows that Amanda had a difficult life as well, knows some if not all of the hell that she’s been through, but she talks about it as though it’s just a chapter from someone else’s book, like it was never really her life at all. She can’t fathom the idea that someone like Berlin might not have completely owned her history, that there might be someone out there who isn’t as strong as her.

She wishes she could be like Irisa, too. Irisa is the opposite of Amanda; she’s not strong, but she doesn’t need to be. Irisa can get away with anything, can be whatever she wants or whatever she needs, and the world swarms around her to try and make it right. She can think or feel or do anything, even terrible things, even _genocide_ , and people automatically feel her pain. Even Amanda goes soft when Irisa cries; even Nolan’s soldier’s heart breaks when his little girl suffers. Irisa has done some unimaginable things, but still the world looks at her as though it owes her something, as though she is the one who needs it, and Berlin can’t understand why no-one ever looks at her the way they looks at poor broken Irisa.

She wishes she could be both. Strong like Amanda when they need her to be, and weak like Irisa when she needs it for herself. She wishes she could own her pain like Amanda has, wishes she could talk about the things she’s been through as though they happened to someone else; she wishes that she had the strength and the self-awareness to make it into a game, a trading of blows and point-scoring and _“if that’s what we’re doing, I will win.”_ She wishes she could let others in as easily as Irisa does, wishes she could let them see all the ways she’s torn apart, wishes she could turn cowardice back into courage as easily as a screwed-up Irathient murderer can turn a cruel world into a compassionate one. She wishes she could be all of those things at once, strong enough to stand up and do what’s right and weak enough that no-one expects her to.

She wishes. A thousand different things, for a thousand different reasons. She wishes, and she’s sorry.

It’s a long time before she finds the strength to get back to her feet. There’s probably a clever little metaphor in there somewhere, if only she was literate enough to find it. Her legs are stiff when she stands, halfway frozen from sitting too still for so long, and they barely hold her up at all.

That’s the story of her life, honestly, and it makes her laugh. There are so many parts of her that don’t work well enough, that don’t hold her up in the right way or at the right time, so many places inside of her that aren’t strong in the way that they should be. It’s why she’s here in the first place, hugging her knees and hating herself, instead of back in Defiance, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a new family, defending a new home from an army of new enemies.

There’s no wall for her to lean against out here, nothing solid she can use to help her stay upright, and she’s not tough enough to even try it by herself, so she bends double, braces her hands on her knees until her legs unfreeze, until the rest of her is steady enough to pretend it’s strong, until she can straighten her spine and hold her head up and not fall.

Conrad’s waiting by the truck, just like he said he would be. He’s leaning against the cabin, chatting away with his Bioman bodyguard like he’s all but forgotten she was there at all.

She’d almost believe that he had, but the look on his face gives him away; he’s staring lazily into the distance, and trying just a little too hard to look thoughtful. She’s seen him do this before, that _‘I’m not trying to show off, honest’_ thing he does, like he really expects her to believe he just toppled out of bed like that. Not that it really works on him, anyway; he’s never quite managed to pull off the brooding cowboy look that Nolan manages so well, though he’s giving it a good shot this time. With his features shadowed by the brim of his hat, hands buried deep in his pockets, he makes the perfect picture of some frontier hero.

She approaches loudly, scuffing the dirt road with her boots; it’s a show, as much for his sake as for her own, and he acknowledges with a tilt of his hat, a faux-gentlemanly gesture that falls about a hundred klicks short.

“Feeling better?” he asks, and all the pretences disappear.

She doesn’t answer, of course. Honestly, she doubts he was expecting her to. “We should go,” she says instead, and studies the horizon like she’s gauging the weather. “Still a long, long way to AngelArc.”

“AngelArc’s not going anywhere,” he says, very quietly.

“Not getting any closer, either.” She shoulders past him, climbs up onto the truck. He offers a hand, but she ignores it, clambering up by herself. It’s awkward, and hardly flattering, but she doesn’t care; this, at least, she can still do on her own. “Let’s go.”

He sighs. He’s got an odd look on his face, sad but guarded, like he knows it’s futile to try and be reasonable but he feels like he has something to prove. “Jess…”

“It’s fine,” she says, much too quickly. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

He watches her for a moment, then shrugs and climbs up too. He settles into the driver’s seat, yanks on his seatbelt, all the while flashing that grin she hates, the smug shtak-eating one that says he’s about to call her bluff whether she wants him to or not.

She shoots him a glare, the kind of warning that he has to know all too well; nine times out of ten it ends with her throwing punches, and eight times out of ten he’s the one catching them. Still, infuriatingly, it doesn’t deter him at all. She probably shouldn’t have expected it to; if a little thing like violence could put him off, they would never have lasted as long as they did. She’s not really known for having a delicate touch, after all, and he’s sure as hell not known for backing down from challenges. In that, if nothing else, they genuinely were a perfect fit.

“Sure it is,” he says, fiddling with the ignition as an excuse to not look at her. “ _Fine_. Like giving away half my stock to a dead-end town with no hope of survival was a brilliant business move. That kind of ‘fine’, right?”

She slams her palm down on the dashboard. “Can’t you shut off that stupid salesman shtick for five seconds?” It’s not exactly fair, accusing him like that, but she can’t help herself. “You’re not impressing anyone.”

He flashes that grin again. “Oh, I beg to differ.”

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, balls her fists in her lap until she hears the knuckles crack, until it hurts just enough to make her wish it would hurt just a little more.

“You’re making it really hard not to punch you again,” she says flatly.

This time he does get the message. He throws up his hands, an exaggerated kind of surrender that works its magic a little too well on the parts of her that are still a little sweet on him.

“All right,” he says, sounding sincere. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even acknowledge the apology; apparently that’s the only way to get him to shut up. She just leans back in her seat, lets her head slam a little too hard against the headrest, and squeezes her eyes shut. She stays like that, unspeaking and unmoving, until he keys the ignition, until the truck starts to vibrate and makes her teeth chatter in her head, until Conrad revs the engine with a whole lot more power than the stupid thing really needs.

He’s showing off, she can tell, making a game of it in a vain attempt to distract her or cheer her up or both. On another day, it might have worked, but not today. Even if she was in the mood for his shtak right now, she wouldn’t deserve it; she’s weak and worthless, a coward who has no right to find comfort in moments like this. She doesn’t rise to the bait, doesn’t even so much as open her eyes. She won’t look at him at all, not until they’re back out on their way, not until the ground is flashing past the window, not until they both have something else to focus on, a nice dizzying view for her and the endless road ahead for him.

They roll out in silence, neither one of them brave enough to break it. She studies him through half-lidded eyes, lets him think she’s trying to sleep. It works for maybe two minutes, then he calls her bluff by booting up the radio. In less than an instant, the cabin is filled with blasting guitars and kettle-drums, and before she even thinks to stop herself she gives herself away with a big dramatic groan.

“Aw, come on,” he says, and she doesn’t need to look at him to know that he’s smirking. “This stuff is classic.”

“Noise,” she mutters, and gives up on pretending to sleep. She opens her eyes and shoots him a glare that could freeze lava. “It’s _noise_. It’s always been noise. Even when it was ‘good’, it was noise.”

He grunts his disapproval but doesn’t argue, and he makes no move to shut it off. Maybe he thinks this will make it easier for her, talking about the heavy shtak with that percussive racket drilling in her ears. Honestly, he’d be right about that; she knows that it’s not a coincidence he picked out one of her favourite movies as the backdrop for his big dramatic _‘run away with me’_ speech. He knows perfectly well that she’s easily distracted, that her willpower is always at its lowest when there’s too much background noise to focus on anything else.

He was clever about it back in Defiance, softening her up with something that he knew would make her smile, a movie that tugged at her heartstrings and made her look at him through different eyes. He knew the answer he was angling for, and set the mood pitch-perfect to get it. The perfect background voice whispering exactly the right words at exactly the right moment, and he didn’t need to say a damn thing. Was it any wonder, with that to contend with, that she folded like a drunk at a poker table?

He’s clever about it now as well, albeit in a different way, chipping away at her temper with his old-world jackhammer until she’s just about ready to explode.

Her knuckles crack again, muffled by the throbbing bass, but he hears it just the same. “Jess,” he says again, almost too soft to hear.

“Don’t.” Her voice cracks too, a whole lot more more tangibly than her knuckles. She hates it. “Just _don’t_.”

“My truck, my rules.” He tries to flash that grin again, but even his salesman’s charisma isn’t enough to sell it this time. He looks like a little boy, anxious and petulant, like he knows his heart is about to get trampled on but it’s more than he can do to step out of the way. “Stop hiding behind your bravado for a second, okay? Stop pretending we don’t both know exactly what’s going on here.” He shakes his head, knuckles turning white where he’s gripping the wheel. “For once in your life, Jess, suck it up and tell me the damn truth.”

“I am—”

“No, you’re not.” He takes a deep breath, blurts it out in a rush, louder even than the screaming singer. “You want to go back. You wanted to go back before we even left.”

The music does its job, as he must have known it would. Her temper explodes like a bomb, like the moment the arch blew up in Defiance, like the moment that showered the town in death and debris. She lashes out, smashes her fists against the dashboard, again and again and again, until Conrad has to take a hand off the wheel to stop her.

He takes her by the wrists, both of them in one big hand while the other one steers the stupid truck, and holds on tight. She hates him for his strength, hates him for holding her, for touching her at all, hates him for the way he won’t let her get away with being weak this time. She hates him, and she hates herself, and she hates that he won’t let her hurt either one of them.

“Get your hands off me,” she snarls. It’s far from the first time he’s had her by the wrists like this, but it’s sure as hell the first time she’s responded like this. Usually, she’s giving the opposite instruction. “Unless you want me to punch you again.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he shoots back with a sad smile. “Unless _you_ want to send us careening into that ravine.”

It’s pretty damn tempting, honestly, but she won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that. She growls instead, struggles half-heartedly in his grip, and fantasises about what it would feel like. It makes for a pretty image, the two of them toppling off the edge of the cliff, disappearing down into the abyss, and all the more so if it comes coupled with another spray of blood from his nose. At the very least, it would hurt a whole lot less than the hell she’s going through right now. She wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of her choices if they died out here; she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life hating herself for not being strong enough, not being brave enough, hating Amanda for seeing her for what she really is, hating Conrad for giving her the second chance she doesn’t deserve, hating the world for not being kinder to cowards like her.

“Fine,” she shouts, a shattered-glass sob that reaches even higher than the singer on the radio. “Yeah, I want to go back. No, I shouldn’t have left in the first place. Yeah, this was all just a great big horrible mistake. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Yeah.” He lets go of her wrists, grips the wheel with both hands. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

And just like that, he slams on the brakes.

They screech to a halt, weapons clattering in the back of the truck. A dead stop, right there in the middle of the goddamn road, like it’s not the most irresponsible, stupid, dangerous thing a person could possibly do in a place like this. Like they’re out here, just the two of them, with no chance of some poor idiot tearing round the bend and getting impaled on that great big Von Bach logo. Like it’s just them, and to hell with the rest of the world.

She should have seen it coming, really; he always favoured big sweeping gestures over common sense.

It’s a long moment before her pulse slows enough that she can breathe again, and when it does she chokes on a laugh; it’s a brittle sound, equal parts shock and disbelief, and it seizes in her lungs. _Idiot,_ she thinks, and the laughter twists into a half-sob.

“Idiot!” Saying it aloud helps to ground her, and she swallows down the bursting feeling in her chest. “What the hell are you doing?”

He doesn’t look at her. “What does it look like I’m doing?” She can think of a dozen potential answers to that, none of them particularly helpful right now, but he doesn’t give her the chance to voice any of them. “I’m turning this hunk of junk around, and taking you home.”

She stares at him, mouth open. The gesture stings, touching and terrible at the same time, and it breaks her heart that he knows her so well and still somehow doesn’t know her at all.

“No.” It comes out like a cry.

He cuts the engine. The radio cuts out too, an impossible high note shattering into silence; in less than a heartbeat, she finds that she almost misses the racket. It’s easy to stay angry, easy to lose her temper with that noise in her ears, the drumming and the drilling and the distraction. It’s easy to keep from thinking of all the ways she’s falling apart when she has to hear some other idiot’s heartache and realise that theirs means more than hers ever will, easy to keep her own mouth shut when some decades-dead rockstar is belting out their pain like poetry in a key she’ll never reach.

Conrad touches her wrist again, a delicate tap with two fingers, then pulls back. “This isn’t a kidnapping, Jess,” he says, like she thought for a second that it was. “I’m not in the habit of holding women against their will. Believe it or not, it’s not really my style.” She huffs a laugh, and he retaliates with one of his own; they’re both strained, halfway to breaking, but at least it’s something. “That town of yours is a lost cause, and we both know it… but if going down with the ship is what you have to do, then I’m sure as hell not going to stand in your way. Just say the word, and we’ll hit the road.”

“No.” She feels like a child again, lost and frightened, so desperate to make herself heard but without the voice or the words. “You don’t understand.”

He must have figured that out already, because he doesn’t look particularly surprised. He studies her for a while, like he’s trying to memorise the lines on her face, trying to trace the shadows under her eyes, taking in every part of her with uncharacteristic sobriety, like he really thinks this is the last time they’ll ever see each other. For all his showing off and machismo, all the old habits that won’t ever die, he really has grown up since the last time they saw each other; there’s almost nothing left at all of the self-satisfied jackass who shared her home and her heart for so long.

He has changed so much, become so much, and the sight of him like this, so mature and so sensible and so quick to understand even when she’s telling him that he doesn’t, makes her feel young in the worst possible way, stupid and unbearably small. It makes her feel like a different kind of coward, the kind that can’t let go of the life that shaped her, the kind that doesn’t have the courage to get better. She feels like it’s all her fault, everything she is and everything she feels, like she’s just not trying hard enough, like Amanda was right to hate her the way she did. Unfair, maybe, but it’s also true.

Conrad touches her hand, brings her back to the present. It doesn’t hurt any less.

“All right,” he says. His eyes are darker than usual, burning with sincerity. “We’ve got all the time in the world out here. Make me understand.”

It’s not an order, not even a suggestion; plain and simple just like him, it’s a request. No more, no less. He wants so badly to navigate the world she’s coming from, to fight back the demons eating at her. He wants to _help_ , in a way he never did before, and that just makes her heart break all the more. She doesn’t deserve him, doesn’t deserve this, and the look on his face is a blow she can’t take.

She closes her eyes, blocks him out, leans forward until her forehead touches the dashboard. It’s not dented at all, like her flailing fists were as impotent as the rest of her. The surface is warmer than it should be, though, metal and plastic turned sticky under the sun, and she waits for the sweat to bead on her brow and sting in her eyes, waits until it’s all she can think about, the heat and the discomfort and the dashboard sticking to her skin. It’s not quite a singer and a high note, the shrieking noise that calls itself music, but it’s something. It stops her from trying too hard to twist herself into something she’s not, and it gives her something else to think about, another much-needed distraction. It helps, even if it hurts, and when the words take shape in the back of her mouth, the honesty isn’t quite so much of a struggle.

“I want to go back,” she says again. “Defiance is… _was_ my home. Those people were my family. My friends, at the very least, and I want… I want to defend them. I want to protect them. I want to be strong, I want to be brave, I want to be good enough to do the right thing. I want…”

“I know,” he says, pushing ever so carefully. “I know you do.”

“But I _can’t_.” Her fingers clench, another worthless blow against the dashboard, dangerously close to her own head. “I’m _not_ good enough, Conrad. I’m not brave, I’m not strong. I’m just…” Another blow, and then another, and then it’s gone, the anger and the violence bleeding out of her and leaving her trembling. “I’m just so damn _scared_.”

He touches the back of her neck again, like he did before. His hand is sweaty too, like her face, and it makes her feel like maybe she’s not the only one who’s flawed. “Okay,” he says.

“No.” Her voice breaks, a gut-wrenching sob that lodges in her chest and makes her hiccup. “No, it’s not okay.”

“Hey.” She feels the muscles in his hand go tight, tensing against her skin, and she turns to find his face. He’s staring at her, brows knitted and jaw white, intense in a way she’s never seen him, like this means as much to him as it ever did to her. “Hey, you listen to me, all right? There is nothing wrong with being scared. There is nothing wrong with getting out when you know a situation is hopeless. There is nothing wrong in anything you’ve done. Do you hear me? It’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to run. It’s okay to survive. It is _okay_.”

“I abandoned them,” she whispers, shaking her head. “I left them to die. It’s not okay.”

He shakes his head too, reaches for her with his arms spread wide. She doesn’t resist, though she wants to, and he takes her stillness as an invitation, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in close.

It’s just a hug, sweet and tender and as chaste as anything she’s ever known. He’s not the Conrad she remembers, all fire and fervour and the kind of lust that presents as love; he used to hold her like the world could end and he wouldn’t care, like his heart would stop if they didn’t take each other right then and there, but this is nothing like that at all. There’s not even a hint of passion in him now, no heat or romance, no grand sweeping gesture or charismatic bravado; it’s kindness, nothing more, a depth of compassion that she doesn’t deserve, and she wonders if maybe he’s realising now for the first time that her being here has nothing to do with him at all, that it never did.

He’s not holding her as a lover, not this time; he’s holding her as a friend. He’s holding her like she’s something delicate, something fragile and damaged, like he can feel all the places where she’s broken, finding the fractures with his fingers like they’re something solid, like wants so desperately to knit them back together. He knows that he can’t, though; he can’t do anything this time, and it’s killing him as surely as it’s killing her. In a sad sort of way, they’re as helpless as each other.

“Jess.” It’s all he can say, the only thing left of her that is still his.

“It’s not okay.” She doesn’t cry, but the way she lets him hold her while she shakes, the way she lets him hear the words, is almost more intimate than the tears would have been. “ _I’m_ not okay. I’m so scared, so lonely, so damn screwed up, and I can’t be what they need me to be.” She shakes her head, buries her face in the crook of his neck. “I wish I could. God, I wish I could. But I can’t, and I’m not. I’m just a weak, worthless coward, and I… God help me, Conrad, I don’t think I can ever be anything else.”

“You can,” he whispers against the crown of her head. “You will.”

She allows herself a moment to take that in, his faith and his presence. She closes her eyes, breathes him in, tries to memorise the smell of him one last time; a last souvenir, maybe, of a shared life that neither of them can get back. It’s a long moment, bittersweet and beautiful, and she cuts it off before it can get too nostalgic. She pulls her her head up, so fast it makes them both dizzy, and lets him see the tears in her eyes.

His are bright too, when she meets them, lit up with love and a kind of regret. He’s looking at her like she’s as beautiful as the moment, like she’s everything, like she could move the whole damn world if she wanted to. She wants to shake him and tell him that he’s wrong, that she’s none of those things, but the words don’t come.

She wants to do other things too. She wants to take him by the throat, take him like the fear takes her; she wants to hold him until he can’t breathe, until he feels what she’s been feeling her whole damn life. She wants to make him understand, really and truly understand what it’s like to feel like this, to _be_ like this. She wants to drive her pain into someone else, make it theirs as well as hers, make it so that she’s not alone any more.

She’ll never have the chance to do that with Amanda, but Conrad is here and eager, and it is so damn tempting to use him instead. She just wants one person in this awful world to see the scared, lonely kid inside of her, to see her and know her and understand her, to look at her when it’s done and still say _“it’s okay”_.

She doesn’t do any of that, though. The radio is silent, and so is her temper, and she’s never had the courage to turn her fingers to claws. She barely even has the courage to look at him.

“How do you know?” she asks instead, a tremulous whimper that probably tells him more than all the rest of it ever could.

“I know you,” he says, like it’s so damn simple. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. Jesus, Jess, you’ve got more strength, more courage in your pinkie finger than I’ve got in my whole damn body.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Von Bachs never exaggerate.” He winks, and it’s so adorable, so damn endearing, she has to smile. “You should know.”

She laughs; if she doesn’t, she’ll cry. “You’re such an idiot.”

He shakes his head. “I’m serious.”

He is, she knows; in all the time she’s known him he’s never said so many words without smirking. The laughter dies in her throat, the ghost of a smile fades from her lips. “Conrad…”

“No. Hear me out.” She sighs, but does. “You’re incredible, okay? And that’s not lip service. That’s not a sales pitch or a business proposition over a dinner date or whatever else you might think of me. It’s just the truth. I know where you came from, I know what you lived through. Doesn’t matter that we never talked about it. You wear it on your sleeve, on your face, on every part of you; you couldn’t hide it if you tried. Hand on my heart, Jess, it’s one of the things I love most.”

“Bullshtak.”

He shakes his head. “Not a bit,” he says, then takes a deep breath, like it’s taking more out of him to admit this stuff than he would ever admit. “I mean it. There’s a difference between cowardice and survival. A big, big difference, and it’s not your fault that life threw you a curveball and turned the good one into the bad. What you went through, that’s not your fault, and it’s not your fault that you can’t just shove it into some disused corner somewhere and leave it to gather dust. Okay? None of that is your damn fault.”

Berlin thinks of Amanda, of how easily she dismissed her own demons, her own hurts. _She can do it,_ she thinks. _She can and I can’t. That has to be my fault._

Aloud, she just says his name, “ _Conrad_ ,” brittle and bitter, like she can stop him believing in her by butchering his name.

He doesn’t let it slow him down at all, just keeps going as if he never heard her. “Life happens,” he says. “It beats you up, knocks you down, puts you into the ground. What happens after you get back up, that’s your strength. And I know you, okay? I’ve seen you get back up after life kicks you down. I know how strong you are.”

She wants to laugh again at that, but there’s nothing left in her. It’s been so damn long since she had the strength to get back up from anything, she’s all but forgotten how it feels. The rush of adrenaline, the burst of faith, of believing if only for a second that she really is invincible, that she really can do anything. Remembering beyond all doubt that she’s here, that she made it, that at least for today she _survived_.

“Been a long time,” she says, more to herself than to him, though he doesn’t seem to mind. “Getting back up was a whole lot easier when the E-Rep had my back. Being strong was a whole lot easier when I had a family. Now it’s just me. And I’m nothing I can depend on.”

“You’re something _I_ can depend on.” He says it like it’s obvious. “Come on. Do you really think I would have given away half my weapon stock if I didn’t? Do you really think I would have wasted my time trying to convince you to spend the rest of your life with me?” He snorts, not quite a laugh but closer than she could manage if their positions were reversed. “I’m not stupid, Jess. I know what it means when a guy says _‘I love you’_ and a girl says _‘I know’_.”

He kisses her, soft and oh so sweet, on the forehead not the mouth. Eyes closed, heart breaking, she lets him. “So why, then? Why bother if you’re so damn smart?”

His eyes are sparkling when he pulls back, bright and more beautiful than she’s ever seen. “Do you really have to ask?” he counters. “You know my life’s better with you in it. Whatever that means, however you need it. Stupid, probably, but there it is.”

She can’t laugh, can’t even try. “You’re full of shit.”

“I prefer the term ‘romantic’.” He flashes that grin, that self-satisfied shtak-eating smirk, but there’s a kind of sorrow lurking at the corners of his mouth, a depth of feeling that she’s never seen in him before. “Look. Doesn’t matter if it’s five minutes or five years or five decades. However long you stick around, I’ll make the most of it. I’ll give you what I can, what you need. I’ll help you, however I can, to get your courage back, find yourself, become whatever it is that you think you need to be. For you, not for me.” He bites his lip, like he wants to kiss her, but knows better than to try; he settles instead for turning away, letting the sunlight catch the water in his eyes. “And before you know it, you’ll be okay. One day, five minutes or five years or five decades down the line, you’re going to wake up and realise you’re not scared any more. You’re going to roll over and say to me, _‘hey Conrad, I’m ready to get back up’_.”

“Conrad.”

“Shh. It’ll happen, just you wait and see. And when it does, I’ll pack up the truck, and I’ll kiss you goodbye, and I’ll watch you drive off back to that town you love so much. And I will be so damn proud of you.”

She swallows hard, wills herself not to cry. There are so many questions she wants to ask, so many different parts of it that she wants to pull apart. She wants to say _‘how can you see all that?’_ or _‘we both know that’s bullshtak.’_ She wants to ask him how he can put so much of his faith in her, or how the hell she’s supposed to put hers in him. So many questions, but just like with everything else, she is too damn scared of what the answers might be, too frightened of what it will mean if he doesn’t answer, if he looks away and deflects the sunlight with the brim of his hat and keeps his pretty eyes hidden. She’s too damn scared of what it will mean if he drops his guard and lets her see that it’s all lies.

So, then, a coward to the end, she doesn’t ask him anything. She just sighs and shakes her head, and says, “I could have loved you.”

“I know.” He leans in, kisses her cheek. “My loss, right?”

Berlin thinks of Amanda, thinks of Nolan and Irisa, thinks of everyone and everything she left behind in Defiance, fighting to defend the place they call home, the people they call family, fighting and fighting and fighting even though they know they’re going to die, fighting because it’s the right thing to do, because they are brave and strong and good and she is not. She thinks of Rahm Tak and the Votanis Collective, of the armed-to-the-teeth strike force biding their time, just waiting for the right moment to raze Defiance and its people to the ground. She thinks of the raiders who killed her family, and the monsters that came later. She thinks of the people she wants to protect, and the things she wishes she could kill.

She looks at Conrad, feels her heart break at the sight of him. He’s a good man, so much more than she deserves; he’s so eager, so willing to pretend, to say and do and believe whatever she tells him to. He will close his eyes for as long as she wants, pretend that this new life really is just like the old one, that she is still the Jessica he fell in love with. He’ll even let her go, lose her again if that’s what it takes, if he knows it will give her what she needs.

Neither of them are stupid enough to think that any of this will make her happy; the world was never made for people like her to be happy, but Conrad will do whatever it takes to get her as close to happiness as she can get. He’ll break his own damn heart for a chance to see hers fixed.

She thinks of the world she came into, of the things that it did to her and the people she loved. She thinks of her family, sees her mother and her brother, remembers their blood burning her skin, the acid burned the back of her throat, the scream that burned right through her and left her fallow. It went on and on and on, that scream, and sometimes she wonders if maybe it’s still going, still burning somewhere inside of her, inextinguishable. She remembers the life that came after, the hell and the horror; she remembers being so scared she couldn’t breathe, so hungry she made herself sick, so cold she shivered for weeks without relief. She remembers hiding in the shadows that scared her, hiding from everyone and everything, remembers surviving and wishing that she hadn’t.

She remembers. She’ll never stop remembering. She’ll never stop being scared and broken and alone. She’ll never forget it, will never be allowed to forget it. She’ll always remember how it felt, and she will never forget the prices she paid for not listening when the fear started to howl. She’ll never stop running, never stop being scared and helpless and small. Even if she lives to see a hundred, she will never stop feeling like she’s eight years old. She’ll never lose that part of her, and it will never, ever, ever stop hurting.

It’s not enough. _She_ is not enough. But it’s all she is. For now, at least, it’s all she can be. And she is so, so sorry.

“No,” she says, and doesn’t see Conrad at all. “It’s my loss.”

—


End file.
